Prototyping Practice: Merging Digital and Physical Enquiries

This paper examines the role of the prototyping in digital architecture. During the past decade, a new research field has emerged exploring the digital technology’s impact on the way we think, design and build our environment. In this practice the prototype, the pavilion, installation or demonstrator, has become a shared research tool. This paper asks how this practice has formed by tracing the different roles of the prototype from ideation and design, to analysis and evaluation. Taking point of departure in CITA’s own prototyping practice, we explore the relationships between physical and digital prototyping as a particular means of validation and verification. Here, a breadth of physical prototypes take on varying roles, in turn informing, testing and proving the research enquiry. The paper addresses how we can differentiate between these modes of prototyping and how.